SemiAccurate’s recent downtime

Updated: We are back…. sort of

As you might have noticed, SemiAccurate has been down for a few days now, and although it is back up, it is an older copy of the database. Here is what we know so far.

Some time Thursday morning we had a catastrophic SSD failure on our server that seems to have been building for quite a while now. Unfortunately the cause of it had been going on for some time unnoticed in the background. This of course corrupted a lot with a lot being defined by databases, backups, and more. This is why you see the old copy of the site, it is the last clean copy we have,

Where do we go from here? We are pulling the old data off the dying server as fast as possible and are fairly confident we can get most if not all of it up eventually. With Hot Chips starting Sunday, we have limited time to pull backup, right now it is a slow file by file slog with slow reboots when you hit a bad sector, what we in IT define as ‘not fun’. Hopefully in about a week, all will be restored with no loss of data.

In the mean time if you are a subscriber and your account is not recognized by this new version or there is a story that you want to read which is not up, please write charlie at semiaccurate dot com and I’ll try to send you a copy or fix the account. Hopefully all will be restored soon and it won’t be a problem.

We will update this story with any new events. Sorry for the downtime and problems.

Update 1: Aug 29, 2016 @ 5am: Sorry for the long delay but things have been happening in the background. We have decided not to change anything on the current version because if we do, when we restore the backups, the changes will be wiped out. Because of that it looks like nothing is happening but it is.

Pulling files off the old dying server is happening at a snail’s pace because when you hit a bad sector, the whole machine goes down. Reboots are slow and frequent but we have the overwhelming majority of the files back and most are 1-2 days from the crash. Hopefully these will be put back on the new server later today.

Once again sorry for the delay but things will be going forward really soon.

Charlie Demerjian is the founder of Stone Arch Networking Services and SemiAccurate.com. SemiAccurate.com is a technology news site; addressing hardware design, software selection, customization, securing and maintenance, with over one million views per month. He is a technologist and analyst specializing in semiconductors, system and network architecture. As head writer of SemiAccurate.com, he regularly advises writers, analysts, and industry executives on technical matters and long lead industry trends. Charlie is also a council member with Gerson Lehman Group. FullyAccurate

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Charlie Demerjian is the founder of Stone Arch Networking Services and S|A. SemiAccurate.com is a technology news site; addressing hardware design, software selection, customization, security and maintenance, with over one million views per month. He is a technologist and analyst specializing in semiconductors, system and network architecture.

As head writer of SemiAccurate.com, he regularly advises writers, analysts, and industry executives on technical matters and long lead industry trends. Charlie is also a council member with Gerson Lehman Group.

Thomas Ryan is a freelance technology writer and photographer from Seattle, living in Austin. You can find his work on SemiAccurate and PCWorld. He has a BA in Geography from the University of Washington with a minor in Urban Design and Planning and specializes in geospatial data science. If you have a hardware performance question or an interesting data set Thomas has you covered.